Up Close and Personal: An Unexpected Sitting with Chuck Close

Growing up in New York City with the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Whitney as neighbors, I always felt a certain familiarity with some of the greatest paintings in the world. As I grew older, I started reading art biographies and learning about everything from Lee Miller sitting for Man Ray to **Françoise Gilot’**s influence on Picasso, and I became fascinated with the artist/muse relationship. What makes someone a muse? I would stare at portraits of women, entirely unknown to me, and try to understand what was going on behind their eyes, what inspired an artist to paint them. In recent years, I’ve travelled far and wide to get a broader understanding of art (Marfa, Texas; Inhotim, Brazil; Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field), but little did I know I would get my greatest lesson on the topic a lot closer to home.

Last August, while I was walking down Bond Street, I paused to read an e-mail on my iPhone announcing John Berggruen Gallery’s upcoming exhibition of the artist Chuck Close. After making a mental note that I wanted to see the show, I looked up and there, less than a few hundred yards from me, basking in the end-of-summer sunshine was Chuck Close himself, wearing audacious black and marigold African-print pants, and a paint-splattered apron over his bare chest, sunning himself in his wheelchair. Oddly emboldened—the moment seemed like a divine intervention of sorts—I approached Chuck and asked if I could show him the e-mail. He grinned, looked at me very intently for a few seconds with his twinkling blue eyes framed by lime green glasses, and then invited me into his studio. His gaze, he told me later, is how he reads the essence of a person; It turns out he—wisely—doesn’t invite just anyone off the street into his studio. Inside, natural light streamed in from a skylight and bounced off the white walls to illuminate a very large, still-wet oil painting of artist Cindy Sherman (that was the paint smudged on Chuck’s apron). There was also a series of eight Polaroids of Barack Obama in various stages of smiling, a wall-size self-portrait woven tapestry, a watercolor print of his beautiful artist girlfriend, pictures of Julianne Moore and Brad Pitt, and a daguerreotype of naked and soulful Kate Moss.

As Chuck watched me survey the space with my jaw dropped and eyes agog, he asked me (with disarming subtlety) to tell him about my life. I was flattered by his intrigue and told him about me, and my lifelong love of art. He then asked if I would like to see his personal collection at his apartment down the street, where he guided me through a treasure trove of art history’s heaviest hitters—from Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol to Jasper Johns to Brice Marden, before showing me portraits by Anthony van Dyck and Tintoretto among many other Dutch, Flemish, and Italian old master paintings. It made sense; he is one of the only living artists who has devoted his entire career to redefining portraiture. I wasn’t sure exactly how much time had elapsed, but I had gotten a bit light-headed from the art and the general preposterousness of my evening. Worried that I would be late for dinner with a friend, I got my purse and prepared to slink back into the real world, when the unexpected happened: Chuck asked if he could photograph me.

A few nerve-racking weeks later, Chuck took my picture at his studio on Jay Street in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. I sat on a stool wearing frayed denim shorts, a Rag & Bone tank and Repetto flats (my “summer in the city” uniform) and looked straight into the antique lens of his 20x24 Polaroid camera, one of only seven ever built. I was completely terrified, but I was trying to project strength and confidence. The list of people who have sat in this seat before me (James Turrell, Bill Clinton, Robert Rauschenberg) was daunting. Chuck wheeled himself out from behind the camera, which is roughly the size of a Volkswagen, to give me direction: Open your eyes so I can see the whites. . . . Put your chin down a drop. . . . Show me—you.” I tried to channel those muses who had captivated my imagination, and took a gulp of oxygen to summon whatever it was that made this famous artist believe I deserved to be in front of his lens. After each flash (he took about ten Polaroids), we sat together waiting the excruciating minutes it took for the image to reveal itself. As a woman raised in a digital age of simply erasing any photograph one finds unflattering, I was anxious, and after reviewing each shot, I found myself preparing for the next one—changing my hair, looking more intently into the lens, shifting my body position. While initially my adjustments were superficial, everything shifted when I realized it wasn’t about showing him what I thought he wanted to see, rather, it was about showing him what he had seen in me in the first place during that chance meeting on a city street. “It’s a journey we are on together,” he explained, looking over the final shots. “Most of my images are not known for being flattering and sitters often have difficulty seeing themselves blown up so large, warts and all. You were one of the people most comfortable in your skin of anyone that I have photographed: self-assured, but a little anxious, bold, but also vulnerable.” So, why me? “I saw the potential of you becoming a muse and very few people have ever fallen into that category except for my longtime muse, composer Philip Glass.” I was floored.

Several days later (to my delight and complete disbelief) Chuck said that he was creating a watercolor-print based on one of the Polaroids. “Once in a while an image demands to have another work of art made from it,” he explained. “The final kicker was that, in the picture, your eyes were surrounded by so much white and your smile turned out perfectly. If you smiled too broadly, the teeth would look like a bunch of Chiclets, and if you didn’t smile enough, it would just read like a dark hole. I know from years of experience how the incremental units of the grid will fall on an image.”

Over the next two weeks, Chuck allowed me to be present for the process, watching my photograph be transformed into an enormous watercolor. It was humbling and fascinating to witness. “This was the fastest watercolor pigment print ever,” Chuck said after it was finished. “These almost always take over a year.” And, aside from a work coming together, something else happened in those two magnificent weeks: I got to really understand the process of one artist through seemingly endless conversations about his work while he worked. Who gets a daguerreotype? Who gets an oil painting? Who gets a Polaroid? What is going on in Chuck’s mind that propels him to make such decisive visual allocations? While he had found a muse in me, I realized that I had found one in him as well.

So—what happens, then, after you become a piece of art? Who does it belong to? The subject? The artist? The world? For me, the answer was simple. I asked Chuck if he would consider donating the work to ARTWALK NY, a cause that benefits the Coalition for the Homeless. He readily agreed—and went a step further by donating a watercolor self-portrait and joining the benefit committee. With the big event upon us, I have had to grapple with not only the emotional complexities of seeing my portrait mounted on a wall for all the world to see, but also the realization that someone—a person I very likely have never met and may never know—will take a part of me home with them. And, perhaps even more strangely, that some girl a hundred years from now may stumble upon the image in a book and wonder, much like I used to do, about the woman in the watercolor.